» Filthy Rich Clients: Developing Animated and Graphical Effects for Desktop Java Applications (Java Series)

Filthy Rich Clients: Developing Animated and Graphical Effects for Desktop Java Applications (Java Series) Reviews

Customer Rating:
Summary: EXCELLENT Learning Material
Comment: This book will save you hours of trouble shooting the little things that don't work as intuitively as they should in Java.
I have not found an un-useful idea here.
It also shows you how to make your application more efficient (faster).
The author has already done the timing tests and offer you the results and the routes you should take.
All in all, a fantastic find.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Very informative, but how convoluted is the access to the demos!
Comment: I have also enjoyed this book very much. Many of these techniques, such as using of intermediate images, were known to me, but numerous details escaped my attention. For example, using of 'compatible images.' I had no idea that this notion exists. I also enjoyed the timing experiments with wait and disclosure of its granularity. Their description of Animators is probably the best and most comprehensive of everything what I saw so far, its a real value-add for me.

I will not repeat the positive accolade summarized here by others, I have one very substantial objection, which is really well summarized in the title used by someone else's comment:

"Practice what you preach."

The book preaches performance, efficiency and style, and yet the authors implement some enormous convoluted scheme around their own code sniplets!

Of course, interested in all the timings and performance of the examples, I wanted to run and watch them. And... I failed at first. I have spend, or wasted rather if you so want, a lot of time in an attempt to achieve this goal.

This sounds so easy nowadays to provide Webstart Java, or merely to deliver some *.java or *.class files, separate or in a *.jar archive.

Not so for Chet and Romain: Their own web page claims that you can download a plugin for Net-Beans and run the examples. Net Beans has proven to be a product, a specific development environment, with which you may or may not be familiar. I never used it and I cannot operate it. Nor am I interested in learning it, being perfectly happy with my own Java setup. But be it as it may, I installed it in the hope to run these demos. It flooded my disk with some 125Mbytes and thousands of files, the usual mayhem, but we have now Terabytes at home, don't we? I also downloaded the plugin, and started to click around to get anything running. Lost in unfamiliar windows and menus I found nothing, no way to start any demo.

I must be getting old. My rusty PhD Dr.Evil brain is too stubborn to crack usage of NetBeans, I failed the IQ test. All right than, I give up. Lets download the source code, run javac and be happy. What can be so difficult, wouldn't you think Minime?

Nope! The adventure has just begun!!

Click on Chapter 2, Swing Rendering Fundamentals. You will get an archive frc-chapter2.zip, in which root directory is no Java code at all. I see merely two folders and two empty files with the same name. On a hunch, step down into the directory SwingRenderingFundamentals, only to find another set of folders and a set of empty files, each with the same name like one of the directories. On a hunch lets step down into HighlightedButton, where we find a bunch of alien looking files and 3 more directories, with you guessed it, 3 more empty files carrying the names of these directories.

Among them is build.xml. XML eh? Hmm... what do I do with that? None of my systems can do anything with XML, this book is not about XML, I do not need to use XML, do I? It's a practitioners book about a specific aspect of Java. I would be happy to stay with "javac" and "java" only, please.

On several places I see a directory called CVS, this may or may not be a name of some source code managing tool. For example, a CVS directory (accompanied again by an empty file with the same name) contains 3 files. Each seem to have some generated content, like this file called Entries: /HighlightedButton.java/1.1/Tue May 01 22:48:46 2007/-ko/
Hm... It most probably serves a project tool of a sort. But how this relate to the book and to the task at hand?

But one directory name is "src". Source, hurray, the treasury hunt might be close to an end! Indeed, this is how you can 'fish' for Java files, best done with a script of a sort to copy all java files into one single place. You will be fine, most of them do not has any package specification corresponding to the directory they were found in. Once you get these files filtered out, you will even find among them Java files containing mere 2-3 lines of code, accompanied by the monster 30-lines Sun copyright node. Vive la lawyers!

Equally convoluted is the way to access these files on Java.net. In a hope for an easy one-click demo, boy I am a lazy spoiled individual, and not willing to give up just yet, I registered an account with Java.net and dived into filthyrichclients.dev.java.net, only to find the same convoluted way of keeping here and there a Java file among a forest of directories and sidecar files. Here however, I got finally educated that CVS is a repository system, and the web pages provide some comprehensive help in its use.

Please do not take me wrong: I do not want dismiss usability of any tool, like NetBeans or CVS, but pardon me, I was happy with my setup. "If it isn't broken, do not fix it," I do not need to get hundreds of megabytes of some unrelated software in order to find a few demo lines of Java, do I?

Authors of a book teaching practitioners in minimality of algorithmic and best application of a graphical API, claiming to provide code examples of merit, should be focussed strictly on the implementation of just such philosophy, and not on their tools. A use of a language like Java can be explained and demo'ed using strictly the Java compiler and its own Java Virtual Machine. Compare this convoluted delivery with other Sun Java tutorials and their one-click demos. I hope that the authors would use "find" of their vast repositories of files to make a tiny set of *.java files, maybe even of class files. That would be all what a reader would need.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: An excellent must have for J2SE
Comment: To push java's ui capabilities has in the past been a bit of a struggle due to the many ways of dealing with Swing, repaints, events, animation etc. This book is an absolute life saver in terms of presenting a unified best practice strategy for everything a ui developer would wish to do in java. It creates very simple applications with solid explanations of what the code is doing, from the low level to the high level. It is also written in a very personable style and the book moves easily and logically through the related material. I wish I had read this book 4 years ago.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Practice what you preach
Comment: I want client-side java very much to succeed, especially now that it is open source, but the java.com site itself uses flash instead of applets, and the first author of this book no longer even works for Sun on java stuff - he now works on Adobe Flex:
http://graphics-geek.blogspot.com/2008/02/what-hello-world.html

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Java Can Be Both Beautiful and Responsive
Comment: This book is fantastic - so many tips and tricks that I was unaware of. I want more!! I hope a sequel is in the making!! Check it out!! You won't be disappointed!!

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